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Comment by Honali | Hacker News Reader

This really reinforces the idea that cordage was less a single invention than a general-purpose mechanical primitive

Indeed. I maintain a mental list of underrated conceptual leaps throughout history and rope is in there. Also on the list is writing, statistics, and the world wide web.

The wheel is overrated. It isn't that innovative (having been invented many times throughout history by various cultures) and to be properly useful it needs environmental adaptations. Controlled fire is neither under- nor overrated, I think.

> I maintain a mental list of underrated conceptual leaps throughout history and rope is in there

One has to wonder how many times they had to be a conceptual leap too. Rope could've been "invented" hundreds of times over the last 100,000 years, depending on how lossy knowledge was.

I think that a huge conceptual leap was the realisation that sex leads to pregnancy. The earliest surviving texts talk of hereditary - implying this was known before writing. This realisation has been the basis of transfer of power and resources, laying the ground for formation of empires and generational blood fueds.

Isn't the sex => baby causation well known even among monkeys?

I expect this would be readily learned from observation (of humans [changes in menstruation relating to puberty and during pregnancy would give a faster-acting conceptual connection] and/or of livestock). The exact mechanism might easily be misunderstood and subject to all kinds of wrong theories, but the causal linkage would be hard to avoid learning. Is it not the general consensus among anthropologists that this practical knowledge would long predate writing?

Surely, if ancient humans could understand and then predict the seasonal movement of the stars to plan agriculture, they'd be able to work out that there is a linkage between sex and pregnancy.

I feel like even in this thread people are missing a huge one:

Pottery.

Can't have soup without pottery. (nit: you can use some sort of leaf bowl but like, eh)

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